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While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau
Age: 44 †
Born: 1817
Born: July 12
Died: 1862
Died: May 6
Abolitionist
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Essayist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
birthplace of Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau
Henry D. Thoreau
Literature
Improved
Easy
Improving
House
Houses
Men
Equally
Kings
Created
Noblemen
Civilization
Inhabit
Create
Palaces

More quotes by Henry David Thoreau

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There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.
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I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
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There is no remedy for love but to love more.
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The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.
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It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
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What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?
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While some men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
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Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.
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The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.
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When a shadow flits across the landscape of the soul where is the substance?
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I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.
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I once found a kernel of corn in the middle of a deep wood by Walden, tucked in behind a lichen on a pine, about as high as my head, either by a crow or a squirrel. It was a mile at least from any corn-field.
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One is wise to cultivate the tree that bears fruit in our soul.
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Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
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How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint.
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When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.
Henry David Thoreau
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Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.
Henry David Thoreau
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Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?
Henry David Thoreau
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When I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street,--not being inclined to change my dress,--to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.
Henry David Thoreau
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Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.
Henry David Thoreau